Posts

Ron Prater has worked in government consulting firms for almost 20 years, including three years with Arthur Andersen LLP. In 2007, he set out with partner Alan Pentz to create a company that would apply real entrepreneurial curiosity to find new ways to solve the U.S. government’s biggest problems. The result is Corner Alliance. Find out how this organization, triggered by a crisis in its formative years, applied the principle of collaboration to devise a new and different kind of corporate culture.

Leadership Lessons

Ron and I have known each other through other people for years. A few months ago I was talking with Corner Alliance Director Sarah Agan, a mutual colleague and veteran consultant. I was intrigued by the unusual ways she described a recent all-hands meeting. “We practice ‘inner voice’ all the time,” she said. “And we have an explicit value to eat our own dog food.” Needless to say, I was intrigued by Sarah’s word choice and even more so by her animation. I wanted to find out more. So I set up some time to talk with Ron and Sarah together.

Ron explained it to me, “‘Eating our own dog food’ means we operate the way we advise our clients to—we follow the same processes and approaches we recommend to them.” “Essentially, we practice what we preach. It can be harder than it sounds when you’re trying to balance helping clients succeed while also trying to grow a sustainable business. And it hasn’t always been that way, even in our company’s short life.”

Learning the Hard Way

Corner Alliance had some growing pains in its early years. “We had a really tough time a few years ago when we lost a project that led to a serious financial struggle,” Ron confided. “I, along with my partner, Alan, and our Director of Operations, Brandi Greygor, responded in typical ways. Privately, we talked daily about how much money we had left in the company’s line of credit and what to do if we maxed out what the bank would loan us. Publicly, we sent a general message to staff that we all needed to ‘increase billability’ but we were afraid to state the full reason.

“We thought we were doing the right thing by keeping the true stress from our staff. The MBA books say it’s important to protect the people from the stress of running the business. And the HR consultants told us we had to follow proper procedures to avoid lawsuits if we did have to lay people off. So we kept things hidden.”

Going contrary to conventional business wisdom, Ron and the other principals listened to their own inner wisdom. “It’s not how our guts said to handle it. We faced a real inner conflict every day for months. How do you form a company of trust and transparency when it seems like all the advice you get—from grad school, friends, lawyers, and more—says to withhold information?

“Looking back,” Ron said, “I grew more personally from that very tough time than from every great year I had. While it was hard, the learning from those six months led to one of the most positive and significant turning points for Corner Alliance.”

Eat Your Own Dog Food

Out of the crisis came a big transformation for the company. “With cost-cutting, along with full transparency with our staff, we managed to stabilize our operations,” Ron said, “And we realized that, on the heels of such a hard and painful time, we had a real opportunity to fundamentally re-think and re-vision.

“So Alan and I announced to our staff that he and I would map out a new company strategy,” Ron elaborated, “including our top three strategic priorities. We told people at an all-hands meeting that we’d start by focusing on which clients to talk to and what to offer them. That message landed with a thud. Within the first few minutes of the meeting it was clear we had made a huge mistake and needed to rethink the approach.

“Our people said, ‘That’s not how we advise our clients to develop strategy. So why are we doing it that way?’”

That uh-oh moment led to a dramatically different plan to create the company’s strategy. “We realized we’d be stronger if we engaged the whole company in the company,” Ron continued. “And instead of starting with what we do and where we want to go, we started with who we are and what we wanted to stand for as a company,” Ron explained.

Put Values First

The group put first things first. “We focused first on our values, and to do that we created a conversation rather than creating a task,” Ron said. “We also found a way to make it a truly collaborative process, not just a collaborative process led by one person. We’ve never been about one-person trust—not at our core—so we found a way to define our values that would reflect that we all have to trust everyone else in the company.

“Since we’re a virtual company with staff in five different states, we selected an on-line tool to help us create the conversation. Everyone could contribute real-time, see each other’s inputs, make comments, and vote.”

Take Your Time

The process of defining yourself takes time Ron learned. “We allowed three weeks to generate ideas, and it took us about four months to solidify our values. If we had tried to get results in a one-day strategy session, our output would have been more generic—even with everyone participating,” Ron added. “People needed time to digest and think through what they stood for and then internalize that in relation to the company. The elapsed time allowed people to contribute at their best, and allowed the most important things to materialize organically.”

They ended up with 10 explicitly stated corporate values that are the foundation on which Corner Alliance continues to be built. Not surprisingly, “Eat our own dog food” was on the short list.

It’s a value that Sarah especially endorses. “We live that value even beyond our approach to strategy development,” she added. “Everyone takes turns running our internal meetings—everyone. We share leadership that way, and expand our capacity as leaders and facilitators at the same time. People get to experiment, practice, and learn in a safe environment, and they get real-time feedback. Just like the leaders we serve, we have to be willing to take risks and make mistakes to learn.”

Sarah continued, “It’s okay for things not to go well. What’s not okay is not learning from it. One of the greatest gifts we give each other is feedback. We are deliberate about creating a culture where we all recognize we’re both perfect and imperfect, where we can bring our whole selves—who we are and who we aren’t.”

Tell It Like It Is

Financial transparency is another key value that emerged from Corner Alliance’s collaborative strategy process. “Alan was instrumental in moving us to open-books management,” Ron said. “We now share just about everything with all employees every quarter, the exception being salary information. We have bi-weekly company-wide calls where everyone sees each other’s billability, our revenue, where we are exceeding or falling short of revenue projections. We don’t hide anything bad or anything good.”

Ron is clear that the effect is palpable. “It has made a massive difference in everyone understanding the business impact of their decisions,” he stated. “It also supports one of our other corporate values, which is sustainability. I believe the whole firm really understands the state of Corner Alliance and can see that we have a really strong foundation for growth right now.”

Be Bold with Clients

That kind of transparency also now extends to Corner Alliance clients—in a bold and differentiated way. The stated value “inner voice” is about people sharing their internal dialog as much as possible, recognizing that’s often where the truth lies. Corner Alliance staff is encouraged to not leave important things unsaid.

“This is definitely not easy,” Ron emphasized. “It takes a commitment to practice over time with our clients and with each other. We actually label it, as in, ‘Using my inner voice, I’d like to say I think there are serious organizational risks associated with what you are considering.’ This makes it easier to do and hear as the person listening now knows that the person speaking is taking a risk.

“Our people know they’ve got the organization behind them every time they venture into inner voice territory,” Ron affirmed. “As Alan points out about using inner voice, ‘It’s a personal risk to reveal what you’re thinking but not saying. It’s a risk to the organization if you don’t.’ But we all also recognize it’s important to apply this value wisely, appropriately, and thoughtfully.”

Perhaps the most unexpected result from this dedication to speaking the truth is that clients have begun to pick up both the practice and the lingo. Ron explained, “When our clients started saying to us, ‘My inner voice is saying xyz,’ we knew we were onto something bigger.”

Reap the Rewards

The list of indicators that Corner Alliance is onto something is long, and now includes growing staff, secure multi-year prime contracts in place, and work with key government executives who have budgets in the billions. “Corner Alliance is poised for an incredible year in 2012,” Ron said with pride. “Not only are we making a difference in the business of government, but we get emails from clients saying, ‘You’ve changed my life.’”

The focus for 2012? “Helping people thrive by doing creative, meaningful work, and living the life they want—not just the work life they want,” said Ron.

The Bottom Line

Ron feels very strongly that what Corner Alliance has created was not led by or done by one person. “Featuring me for this article is actually counter to our culture,” Ron stressed. “Corner Alliance has been led by a collaborative approach using values as our core, and that’s precisely what will lead us into the future.”

http://trustedadvisor.com/public/trusted_advisor1.png00Andrea P. Howehttp://trustedadvisor.com/public/trusted_advisor1.pngAndrea P. Howe2012-04-26 07:25:132012-04-26 07:48:21Real People Real Trust: Transforming a Business from the Inside Out

This is partly because they can: technology has made work-sourcing a global phenomenon, freed from space and time. It’s also partly because they have to: global sourcing means competitiveness is also global. The global economy has undergone a massive make/buy analysis and has come down heavily on the “buy” choice. If you’re not working with the world’s best/lowest cost doer of some key task, then you’re at a disadvantage.

The nature of work has shifted from a “job” focus to a “project” or “task” focus. Employers no longer need “someone who can do…” but rather “someone who has done, and will do…” The new work model is not semi-permanent vertical employer silos of people; it is the model used by the film industry and by consultants, a constantly shifting nexus of tasks and resources.

Recruitment comes to resemble an ongoing speed-dating event.

People. I think we’re finally past decrying the lack of employee “loyalty;” it’s so last millennium. People are “loyal” to their professions, their technologies, maybe their customers – but not to the constantly morphing corporate entities that sign their paychecks.

The skills of the new generation have evolved to fit the new workplace. The Facebook generation, adept at mass-scale peer relationships, doesn’t relate well to authority, no matter which side of the relationship they’re on. Geography? Twitter is everywhere and while not every 20-something can afford time in Europe, they all know someone who can and does, and can all Skype it and tweet it 24-7 in the meantime.

The oldsters may not like the verbal promiscuity of “friending,” but it fits perfectly with the new workplace. While society may pay a price in the dearth of deep, vertical relationships, the market place is demanding breadth.

Attraction and Retention Redux

Let’s put these trends together. What the economy needs, and what people are organizing to offer, is the ability to form relationships at the speed of transactions.

To companies, the attractive employees are not those with deep potential; they are those who can hit the ground running in a plug-compatible world, instantly connecting with thousands of like-minded peers within the company and without.

To people, the attractive employers are not those who offer long-term “commitments” (usually just relationship-disguised transactional offers anyway) but those who offer the ability to be instantly productive, while offering personal growth opportunities in the form of autonomy and new activities.

There is an obvious match here. What is no longer obvious is the relevance of “retention.”

Why would an employer want to retain people when the changing market requires ever-changing skills that can be bought quickly with precision rather than trained over time with generality?

Why would an employee want to be retained, when (s)he can find ever-changing opportunities to gain experience in a world thousands of times bigger than one employer alone could ever hope to offer?

Attract! Attract! Three New Strategies for Companies

The above are massive trends. The trend is your friend. The challenge is to ride the trend, not fight it. Here are three strategies for doing so:

1. Aim for zero cost onboarding and training. Zero works well as a stretch goal, but it’s not enough. How can you get people to pay you to join your company? (This is not as crazy as it sounds: how much do people pay to go to Harvard? So, become the “Harvard of YourNiche.”)

2. Reverse-hire search firms. Tell Russell Reynolds you want every employee to get one bonafide offer from an outside firm every year to keep them motivated. If they stay with you, they have re-upped, and become re-attracted. If they leave, you can choose either to recalibrate your attractions program, or wish the employee well and let them tell the market how employee-dedicated you are. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Tony Hsieh already does a version of this at Zappos, paying people not to take a job offer).

3. Up your knowledge management game. Tenure is such an expensive way to gain company knowledge. Figure out how to make it available to every employee, from day one.

And don’t assume that means AI and databases. Try the same thing that works in the outside world: massive horizontal networking. Invent intra-LinkedIn and Intra-Tweet. (This is not as crazy as it sounds; Clay Hebert is working on SpinDows)

Attract and retain? That sounds like a motto for a roach motel. The new mantra is Attract! Attract!

———————————————————————————–

Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits. Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ info@trustedadvisor.com.

Leadership Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look at the leadership in your organization. Does it have some of the following characteristics? If you’re a leader yourself, think hard, you might be contributing to a low-trust organization. These issues all arise from leadership choices, after all.

1. The Cult of the Corner Office thrives.

Do you have corner offices that are not conference rooms? Do they come with extra appointments, more square footage, better desks? Are there criteria for who gets them? You may have an issue.

If you have sanctified real estate, the odds are you have other visible symbols of class status and rank. With one exception, class systems detract from trusted relationships in an organization.

The exception: you’re intentionally running a business that connects meritocracy and materialism. Some trading operations fit that description. But you’re not likely to confuse them with high trust environments anyway.

2. The highest performer is a values-offender.

Name the 2-3 smartest, highest-bonus, most successful persons in your organization. Does at least one of them get there by thumbing his or her nose at your avowed corporate values? Then you have a problem.

Values mean nothing if they are not enforced. Very few values statements have exceptions clauses (“…unless you can make a really profitable sale..”). What part of “team player,” “integrity,” or “client-focused” do you think rhymes with not showing up at team events, obfuscation, or self-aggrandizing?

Nothing shoots holes in values statements like blatant hypocrisy.

3. Blame is an art form.

Blame is the opposite of responsibility. If leadership means anything, it means taking responsibility. If the first words out of leaders’ mouths in the face of difficulty are to blame the situation or another person, what you have is the absence of leadership.

Don’t confuse an explanation with an excuse. Explanations are important; they help us know what to do differently next time. They do not, however, let anyone off the hook. Leaders can’t be let off the hook; that’s part of the definition of leadership.

Blame and its twin “inability to confront” corrode trust. They both try to disconnect responsibility from the truth. Leaders don’t do that.

4. “Need to know” is your catchphrase – and you’re not in the military.

The military, and military contractors, legitimately operate on a “need to know” basis. Not too many others do. It’s an easy rationalization that leads to low trust.

If I say you don’t need to know something (outside the military), it means you can’t be trusted with the information. Maybe you’re incompetent, maybe you’re a blabbermouth, maybe you’ll misinterpret it; there can be many reasons for low trust. But they’re all low trust.

If I don’t understand or accept why I have no need to know, then I will resent you telling me. Resentment leads to all kinds of avenues, none of them good, and all of them low-trust at heart. Need-to-know erodes trust.

None of them above is any different because it’s a policy: a policy to withhold the truth systemically just means you have a systemic approach to withholding the truth. Now you have a whole organization that is untrusting.

5. The need to “have a positive outlook” trumps the need to tell the truth.

Many a leader has said, “We need to keep people’s morale up, make sure they hear this the right way, don’t let them get depressed.” That way lies trouble. Because the truth has a way of getting out.

Most people in most situations would prefer to hear the truth, to make up their own minds. They don’t trust people who assume they know better. Remember Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men, yelling, “The truth! You can’t handle the truth!” Don’t be that guy.

In the next post, we’ll explore 5 ways in which products and services can indicate a low-trust organization.

Stephen M.R. Covey, in his recent Trust Matters interview, notes that politicians rank lowest in trust among all professions. He identifies counterfeit behavior as the underlying cause.

He’s right; and of all the high-visibility disagreements today – wars, abortion, debt – none has inspired more flagrant counterfeit behavior than health care. It’s a polarizing issue in itself – and its abuse by politicians puts added stress on the social compact.

A Massive Inconvenient Truth

Never mind climate change. Here are a few far greater inconvenient truths that everyone knows, but no one will admit:

Only a very small portion of the US population could afford to pay for the health care they have come to expect

The health care system as it exists could not survive without massive government subsidies

Health care is an economic good – as with housing, food and consumer goods, what you get is what you can afford.

Our collective inability to admit these truths in a socially useful manner means that the cost of health care is killing jobs and crippling American competitiveness. Like parasites choking their host, the politicians are too tied up with reality-as-we-like-to-pretend to speak the truth – even though we all know it.

Result: bad health care, bad economics – and bad social trust.

How We Got Here

Albeit with the best of motives, Medicare, ERISA, and subsequent regulations greatly expanded the proportion of the population who could seek health care. Health care usage exploded as people took advantage of a service seen as low cost and already paid-for. With that expansion, hospitals, insurance carriers, drug companies, device makers and health care providers were able to train doctors, fund research and invest in marketing programs; all paid for with government and employer dollars.

Laudable though the goals were, the legislation also forced mid-sized and large employers to devote an ever-increasing proportion of their compensation expense to employee benefits – with a resultant decline in real wages. Until the Affordable Care Act, small employers could avoid the non-discrimination rules through the purchase of insured health plans.

The inconvenient (again) truth is: this tangled web of intertwined interests has become so pervasive that the “private” health care industry would implode without the government. Health care in the US has become an entitlement program for both individuals and for industry – and no longer perceived by most Americans as an economic good paid for with wages or profits.

Where We Stand Now

Health care contributes to both our slow job growth and our growing income inequality. When health care costs grow as a proportion of compensation, rising lower-wage employee costs begin to overwhelm the value they can add. Naturally, employers then shift to exempt part-timers and contractors. Small employers, once exempt from the rules, now simply avoid adding workers.

The experience of every other nation is that health care rationing is an essential element of any solution; we can’t outrun it. We have not faced up to that inconvenient (yet again) truth in the US.

Enter: the Politicians

Health care is a fault line around which our two primary political parties have entrenched themselves. The GOP has the problem in its sights – but can’t stomach the solution. Democrats misstate the problem – and thus propose ever more expensive solutions. Both are hostage to ideologies.

Republicans look knee-jerk to the private sector, touting doctor choice and the doctor/patient relationship as a panacea. Their inconvenient truth is that the system will fail without the government – and that most of their voters will be unable to afford coverage.

Democrats insist on universal coverage with equal benefits for all, and the right to sue if things don’t go well. Their inconvenient truth is that the system is unsustainable – and that their children will have to disavow it.

Neither solution is viable. We all know it, but bury our head in ideological sands. And yet the same time – because we really do know the truth – we don’t trust our leaders because we know they are lying to us. They refuse to speak the truth.

Getting to the Solution

Our politicians give only the answers we want to hear. We know they aren’t true, but we fear the other side’s answers more, so we cheer for the answers we fear less. We don’t want to “lose.” Which means we all don’t trust anyone – and we all lose.

The strongest force against trust is the willingness to leave the truth unspoken.

Is there any candidate, anywhere, willing to say simply that not everyone can have the same health care? Can any candidate achieve escape velocity from our debilitating ideological prison? And would the rest of us be willing to acknowledge the truth if someone had the courage to speak it?

In a following post, we’ll discuss one potential solution and why our politicians will give up our trust in order to avoid it.

In 2000, I co-wrote The Trusted Advisor, with David Maister and Rob Galford. At the time, it was aimed largely at external professional services advisors. The word “leadership” appeared exactly once in the book (I checked).

This month, Andrea Howe and I published The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook. The subtitle is, “A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust.” “Leadership” occurs 19 times, and the l-word itself appears many more times in its various forms.

That’s hardly surprising. Trust is a fundamental human relationship that’s been around since well before the written word.

The World Changed

My Trusted Advisor co-author Rob Galford was more prescient than I; he wrote The Trusted Leader way back in 2003. Or, maybe he was ahead of his time. In any case, by 2011, the world looked radically different than it did in 2000.

In particular, the business world is:

Flatter – more horizontally linked, less vertically integrated

More inter-connected: think Linked-In, outsourcing, offshoring

More wired – Windows XP was then; the cloud and iPad are now

More independent – Boomers ruled then; millennials rule now

More collaborative ­– YourCo against the world is DeadCo

More transparent – Facebook, data scraping, digitized everything

More networked – a competitor in one line is a partner in another.

Leadership Changed

In 2000, “leadership” conjured up images of #1 leader Jack Welch pacing the floor in front of high-potential candidates at Crotonville, violating the chain of command with exhortations for “boundarylessness” – as long as it stayed within the boundaries of the corporation known as GE, that is.

Today, “high-potential” sounds not just elitist but out of whack with reality. Just as everyone today is a salesperson, everyone is in customer service – so too everyone is a leader.

That’s not corporate double-speak; it has meaning. The leadership skills of today are persuasion, influence, collaboration, the ability to create alliances, to join forces, to create environments that encourage collaboration, the ability to play nicely together in the sandbox, to forge agreements, and to play long-term win-win rather than screw-your-customer to jack up the quarterly numbers.

Leadership Skills are Trust Skills

Those skills are trust skills. We don’t need fierce competitors, we need fierce collaborators. We don’t need to ‘win one for the gipper,’ we need to win one for all of us. We don’t need vertical skills, we need horizontal skills.

Certain leadership skills are constant: the ability to inspire, to create and articulate visions and stories, for example. But others have been replaced. Being good at vicious infighting to gain the top job is – on balance, in most companies – a lot more dysfunctional these days than valuable. Making “tough decisions” isn’t the virtue it used to be; sometimes it just reflects a failure of imagination.

Today organizations are less about being led and more about cultures that foster leadership throughout. Such cultures are driven by what we call Virtues and Values.

“I helped Maia and Maia helped me”… was the breathless comment of a three year old at the end of a very successful Easter egg hunt recently; she had formed a partnership with an equally ambitious four year old egg-hunter to be clear winners in the task of finding (and consuming!) as many Easter eggs as possible.

At the other end of the age spectrum, a Chief Operating Officer said to me last week that senior leadership relationships in his organization were improving through an increased readiness to approach colleagues with the simple request, ‘I need some help. Please do me a favour.’ It had not been easy to start to do this, he pointed out, because it had implied a declaration of vulnerability but the results were making it most worthwhile.

As leaders strive to build the agile, trust-based cultures that fuel the quality conversations – strategic, creative, curious, experimental – needed to generate breakthrough ideas and breakthrough execution, I notice them using more and more the language and approaches of ‘help.’ Are you noticing this too?

Thinking About Helping

If so, we might turn to Ed Schein’s 2009 book Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help. Schein suggests ‘what we think of as effective teamwork, collaboration and co-operation can all be understood best as consistent effective mutual helping.’ He defines teamwork as ‘a state of multiple reciprocal helping relationships including all members of the group that have to work together. Building a team therefore is not just creating one client/helper relationship but simultaneously building one among all the members.’

Schein points out the many challenges involved in giving and receiving help. As receivers of help, we can often feel diminished or ‘one down’ when offered help. As givers of help, we must consciously pause and turn away from what seems to be most pressing at the time in what are often very busy, hectic lives.

Principles of Helping

Three principles and tips stand out from Schein’s advice to leaders:

Task interdependence is the foundation of strong mutual helping relationships. Maia of the Easter egg hunt understood perfectly that she and her little friend had better chances working together than did others searching on their own. Similarly, a VP of Sales and a VP of Operations in an IT Services company have formed a very strong ‘helping’ relationship around the challenging task of entering a new market. Schein argues that, without these mutually important tasks, it is very difficult to form strong ‘helping’ relationships. He zeroes in on the importance of solicited, specific, descriptive and goal-related feedback–enabling colleagues to become more helpful.

The strongest helping relationships occur when both giver and receiver are ready, and the relationship is equitable. He urges the giver of help to check whether the person she wants to help is ready and able to receive it; and the receiver to give regular feedback on what is and is not helpful—in particular, being clear when help is no longer required.

Effective helping starts with pure inquiry, a strong effort to understand and empathise with the needs of the person requiring help. No matter how clear the request for help, he urges us to pause and reflect, truly to listen, and to challenge our own assumptions. This is particularly important at the beginning of a helping relationship because it enhances the status of the one being helped, and maximises the information available to the helper.

The Trust Equation and Helping

The Trust Equation supplements Schein’s notions as a strong frame for effective helping relationships. To be truly helpful to you, I focus on your needs, not mine (low Self-orientation); you are safe raising any issue you wish with me, and I will engage with you at both emotional and rational levels (high Intimacy); when you ask for advice, I will be clear and truthful (high Credibility); and you can rely on me to be available to you when needed (high Reliability).

I recently saw one CEO commit to his organization to:

Encourage open feedback across my leadership team about the pursuit of the team’s collective and individual goals. Above all, cultivate a readiness in the team to say ‘I am not sure’, ‘I need some thoughts on this one’, ‘This is not quite going as we would wish it to.’

Adopt an even more inquiring approach with my colleagues, really listening in order to understand their needs for help, and challenging my own assumptions about what I think they need.

Check in regularly on what help is needed and how this is changing.

Invite help myself, showing my own vulnerability as a result. Acknowledge my own deficit of understanding and knowledge in numerous matters.

He will help his organization and his organization will help him. Just like the Maia egg-hunting partnership.

This is one of my all-time favorite stories. Three umpires (baseball, for our international readers) were talking about how they make calls on each pitch.

The first umpire said: “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call them like they is.”

Umpire number two said: “No, there’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call ’em like I see ’em.”

But it’s umpire number three that I like. He said: “There’s balls and there’s strikes, but they ain’t nothin’ until I call them.”

The Third Ump

What sets umpire number three apart? First, he understands that distinguishing a strike from a ball is fundamentally a judgment call. Television’s K-zone aside, it’s his job as the umpire to set a strike zone, to watch the pitches and declare where each pitch sails: inside, outside, high, low, or right down Broadway.

Second, he knows the integrity of the game depends on his certainty in his calls. The pitches really aren’t anything until he makes his pronouncement, and he has the courage of his convictions.

Lessons in Leadership

And how does the third umpire tie into leadership? A good leader does the following:

Knows that a lot of decisions are in fact judgment calls, and is willing and able to make them – command presence.

Provides clear and concise direction.

Demonstrates passion and yes, courage of her or his convictions.

Sets a fair and consistent “strike zone” and applies that to everyone.

The third ump, or the good leader, isn’t arrogant, non-collaborative or deaf to others. The good leader is willing to take on the tough responsibility of setting priorities, being clear in direction and demonstrating the passion to get others believing in the vision.

http://trustedadvisor.com/public/iStock_000000501173XSmall.jpg300400Sandy Styerhttp://trustedadvisor.com/public/trusted_advisor1.pngSandy Styer2011-05-03 06:00:302011-04-18 11:21:49Lessons in Leadership and the Three Umpires

With all the trust surveys proliferating out there, I’m sure one of them includes questions that rhyme with “do you trust leadership of __?” And if so, I’m pretty sure the numbers have declined over recent years.

And I think most C-suites would agree that leadership—at corporate and institutional levels—would benefit greatly from being more trusted. In other words, the times scream out for a clear approach to trust-based leadership.

So—here are the headlines.

Trust-based Leadership: the Top Ten List

1. Don’t Fake It. The best way to be trusted—by far–is simply to be trustworthy. Reputation follows trustworthiness—not the reverse. The best PR comes from publicizing good things, not from spinning them. Don’t put your marketing, PR, or communications in charge of trust; you are in charge of trust, 24-7, by your own thoughts and actions. Don’t confuse the metrics with what they are supposed to measure.

2. Your Ego is Not Your Amigo. Being driven can be OK. So too can being impatient, customer-obsessed, product-obsessed, design-obsessed, or people-obsessed. What cannot be OK is being obsessed with yourself. If you can’t check your ego at the door, seek professional help; stop taking it out on others. It is Not About You. If you think it is About You–you might be a bad leader.

3. Collaborate, Don’t Compete. No one is the enemy. Not your customer, not your supply chain, your employees, the union, not even your competitors. If you think you are competing with anyone, you are focused on gaining advantage over others; you are making yourself the center of things. (See Rule 2 above). Let others obsess with competing. You be the one to go think about what you can do for [customers, employees, your supply chain, even your competitor]. She who adds the most value lives best. And longest, at least in terms of client loyalty.

4. Leading is Emotional. Choose your own leader; not one of the Usual Suspects. Now ask: were they passionate? My guess is they were, and their moments of passion were the source of much of their influence. Leaders lead, which means others follow them, and emotional passion is a big driver. Very few people follow the numbers-only guy or gal.

5. Integrity Means Wholeness. You can’t be all things to all people. The more you try, the less integrity you appear to have. What you can do is to be the same person, at all times, to all people. That makes you whole, entire, integral—one who has integrity. A leader is unafraid to show his whole self.

6. Be Transparent. A trust-based leader welcomes reality. The goal is to change reality, not to spin it. To see things as they are and to change them is noble. To see things as they aren’t and talk about them as you think you would wish others to see you as talking—well, that’s just BS. Don’t go there. A leader knows that reality is her friend.

7. Play Long Ball. You can’t be transactional and be trusted. Transactions can only be trusted in packages. Time is the key. Never cut a deal with someone—cut the 27th deal in a chain of 132 deals you intend to cut with them. That way you build a relationship—reliability, connection, mutual obligations, and the business vocabulary to express them. A leader is always thinking and acting in the long term.

8. It’s Personal. The Godfather line, “It’s not personal; it’s business” was precisely wrong. It is both. Leadership can’t be trusted unless leaders are trustworthy. Companies aren’t trusted (except for the narrow case of reliability); people are. Trust can be engineered; but at the end of the day, all trust is experienced as personal. A leader exemplifies it.

9. Trust is Relationship. Robinson Crusoe didn’t need trust (before Friday, anyway). Trust is like ballroom dancing—you need two to tango. One trusts, the other is trusted. One by itself isn’t even the sound of one hand clapping. It’s non-trust. You can’t be trusted if you don’t trust back. There is no trust without both parties in relationship. A leader knows how to play both roles; by trusting, he becomes trusted. By being trustworthy, he invites trust.

10.There is no Trust without Risk. Trust mitigates risk, but only by taking another risk. Ronald Reagan’s ‘trust but verify’ was good politics, but bad trust. Verification destroys trust. Trust is risk freely-taken, for the greater advantage of both. It is paradoxical, which is why risk-mitigation techniques end up destroying it. A leader knows that sometimes, she’s just gotta take a leap.

This week we’ll be exploring the theme that business is inherently personal, and that we’ve forgotten that fact to our detriment.

Last weekend I saw the movie Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s latest, about the early days of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in South Africa. It stars Morgan Freeman (of course) as Mandela, and Matt Damon, as captain of the hapless rugby Springboks, South Africa’s version of the Chicago Cubs.

Mandela knew that the Springboks were as hated by the black population as they were beloved by the Afrikaaner whites. His insight was to see the power of reconciliation that could be achieved if the team were to pull off the equivalent of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team’s victory.

The movie reviews are mostly positive; even the critical ones suggest that Eastwood got the critical story right. And the true story itself is so enormous that it needs no embellishment. For my part, Eastwood has rounded the sharp edges over the years, and increased the role of heart. For me, he has earned the right (since as far back as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly et al) to jerk my heart around pretty much as he wishes.

But this is a business blog, not a movie blog.

The Best Way to Lead, and the Best Way to Manage

We meet Mandela just after he has been elected president, after nearly 30 years in prison. His power lies in the overwhelming respect he merits by forgiving all those who imprisoned him.

In his first meeting with the Matt Damon character, Pinnear, Mandela asks him a question: How do you lead? Pinnear’s answer is clear, and Mandela delightedly agrees with him.

The best way to lead is to lead by example.

Mandela leads by refusing to fire the white former security officers, thus personally demonstrating reconciliation of the highest order on Day One of his administration.

The second question Mandela poses is, what is the best way to manage? And his answer is equally clear.

The best way to manage is through inspiration. And the best way to inspire is to demand of others things they cannot themselves conceive of accomplishing.

As Pinnear’s wife asks him how the meeting went, it dawns on Pinnear that Mandela has just acted on those two questions–by asking him to lead the hapless Springboks to (gasp) the World Cup championship, a goal he himself could hardly conceive of.

Leadership and Management: Whatever Happened to Role-modeling and Inspiration?

It was only 15 years ago that Collins and Poras conceived of BHAGs–Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals.

It was 21 years ago that C.K. Prahalad suggested that Strategic Intent–basically a "stretch" view based on direction, discovery and destiny–should inform strategy.

Warren Bennis has been preaching for many decades now the importance of role-modeling.

The image that remains today from "Shoeless" Joe Jackson’s 1919 conspiracy to fix the World Series is that of a kid saying, "Say it ain’t so, Joe!" In other words, dismay at the betrayal of a role-model. The fallout from today’s flame-out by Tiger Woods is discussed more in terms of brand image than of leadership.

The dialogue these days about the financial meltdown is centering on compensation incentives and structural reform. Management by inspiration? Not in evidence lately.

The point is not whether scientific management doesn’t have its place; surely it does. But that place has been overdone to the detriment of both leadership and management.

This is not some untested thesis. Mandela accomplished some remarkable things by applying these human principles to an "organization" of some 50 million people, and to problems as intractable as racism. Makes Citibank look like a walk in the park.

Whether you liked the movie or not, Clint Eastwood is channeling a message for our times.

Craig Newmark, founder and Chief Customer Service officer of Craigslist, spoke last week at the Harvard Business School Club of New York, a talk he titled “Trust is the New Black.” Can I borrow that phrase, Craig? With attribution, of course.

I had not heard Craig speak before. Readers of this blog will find themselves nodding at many of his comments, and I for one found his thinking on several issues to be insightful and provocative.

Since I am not a professional reporter and did not record his talk nor take detailed notes, let me state that these are my impressions: while I’m trying to make my comments correspond to the reality of what he said, any disconnects are entirely my fault.

Unlike many speakers in the HBSCNY series, Craig allowed his comments to be on the record; he also gave out his email, Facebook and Twitter addresses freely. Not really surprising for someone who describes his primary job as being customer service. As he put it, “I haven’t done customer service for—oh, about an hour now.”

In the same vein, he suggests, “customer service, if done in good faith, is a form of public service.” That takes “doing well by doing good” to a whole ‘nother level. (I see some parallels with Buddhist Capitalism).

Craig Newmark on Leading and Managing: Competition, Metrics, Timeframe

Craig stated in definitive terms a couple of themes that readers of this blog will resonate with—the need for long-term thinking, and the focus more on commerce, and less on competition.

Someone asked about what he focused on: “I’m focused on the next 20 years, with an eye to the next 200. And I’m not kidding.” He isn’t, either. He’s very conscious of changing society, e.g. his recent involvement in veterans’ affairs.

In response to the question, “Who among your competitors most causes you to lose sleep?” Craig answered, “I don’t really lose sleep over competition at all. My focus is much more on customer-related issues—spam and scam, service.” My translation: Take care of your customers, and your competition issues will take care of themselves. (It also brings to mind an old Jerry Garcia quote: “The Grateful Dead don’t strive to be the best at what we do, but the only ones who do what we do.”)

On analytics: “We get lots of anecdotal feedback, and rely on intuitive skills. Whenever I’m in New York, I love popping in on realtors. We’re not so big on formal analytics.” I can’t read Craig’s mind, but I suspect he’s also got a healthy suspicion about the dangers of OD’ing on analytics.

Craig Newmark on Trust

Craig uses the designation “curators” to describe the job of editors; that was new to me, and I like it. “The news curators have a particularly big role to play in restoring trust in the media.”

Craigslist puts a lot of effort into combating fraud. One person asked whether it was a losing battle, with fraud increasing. Here’s what Craig said: “You can’t make the world 100% safe, trust doesn’t come without risk. But in my experience [and he has a lot, I might add–CHG] the vast majority of people are trustworthy; maybe 1% of people have bad intentions. Just use commonsense.”

Asked about ways to improve trust going forward, Craig talked about establishing different levels on the scale between anonymity and certifiable identity. For a small transaction, maybe we don’t need to know much. For larger transactions, we need to have higher levels of verified identity.

Fair enough, but I actually found his answer to an earlier question to be even more relevant. “I’m not interested in politics, my focus is governance,” he said. “And we’ve got some great examples of governance right here in the US; they’re called the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If you focus on asking how to work with those forms of governance, you can frame political issues in a far more productive way.” I’m guessing that Craig sees that focusing on issues of governance at the corporate level is similarly a way to resolve issues of competition, politics and social relevance, not to mention customer service.

My words now, not his: I think what he’s doing is running an organization which is at once purely capitalist and at the same time, always striving for integration into a broader context of social responsibility. Remember: “the dedication to true customer service through a for-profit enterprise is a form of public service.”

Capitalism and social responsibility are not incompatible: Craig Newmark is one of those rare leaders who sees that, done right, they are in fact inextricably linked, and for the benefit of both.

Recent Blog Posts

How do you open a sales call? Do you strive to establish credibility? Thought leadership? Make a positive first impression? Establish trust rapidly? There are lots of answers to that question, and I’m going to suggest most of them are sub-optimal. And, I’m going to suggest, there is one single Best Practice way to do […]

When you offend someone, someone is offended. That seems obviously, trivially true. But the two are very different events – each touching on a part of the human experience, and each teaching us something about trust. The Social and the Psychological Disrespecting someone is a social violation: it is not a nice thing to do. […]